dark matter

this morning young dave and i ventured further afield for our walk. herself cadged a lift with himself and my boy on their way to meet the taxi. the plan was we would walk back home along the river, thus introducing dave to more grass. dave has taken to the beach like a duck to shingle as our garden has a lot of stones underfoot. but the lawn, as regular readers will recall, was paved over in one of herself's landscaping projects. so dave tends to look a little perplexed when faced with grass, hence the river idea.

as we disembarked from the car my boy gave herself a hug and in a rather gloomy manner said,

"see you after school, so long as the world doesn't end."

there had been a certain amount of discussion about the world ending last night. it seems that in assembly at school one of the science teachers had been explaining how a very important experiment was due to take place today. this experiment involved a couple of very large magnets in a tunnel. it seemed that the experiment would involve a number of bisons and other creatures buzzing round in circles at high speed. the mind boggles at what bisons would look like running in circles. lurchers of course do this sort of thing with no trouble at all but your average bison is a much bulkier beast. the whole point of the bisons running in circles was to produce dark matter. i really would not recommend anyone getting downstream of a bison that has been running in circles for any length of time. a dizzy bison would almost certainly produce quite a stream of dark (and no doubt very smelly) matter.

anyway, the reason they wanted to make the bisons produce dark matter is because they can then see what the beginning of the world looked like. it is well known that all living things came out of a very big swamp. what i had not realised was that the swamp was the result of dizzy bisons. which means there must have been bisons before the swamp. so where did they come from? this sort of thing makes my head hurt. it is almost as bad as the chicken and the egg thing. i suppose that is why i am a lurcher and not a particle physicist.

the trouble with dark matter, it seems, is that it acts like a sort of hoover, sucking things into it. my boy seems to have interpreted this as meaning that the experiment would lead to the whole world getting sucked into the bison poo and not being able to get out. this is because bison poo is apparently full of things called glue-ons, which do exactly what it says on the tin.

my boy was most perturbed about the whole business and spent most of yesterday evening looking things up on the internet, interspersed with coming down and worrying the peeps about it all. in the end himself got a bit exasperated.

"what kind of idiot, in a school where a third of the kids are autistic, announces in assembly that the world might end?" he bellowed. this had me ducking for cover as i recollected the business of the cookery teacher's demands for impossible ingredients, and how my boy never fails to tell the relevant teacher just how complimentary himself has been.

i left writing this post until lunchtime in case my boy had been right. no point in writing something that no-one will be around to read...